“Hah, strongly scented foods, that’s a good one,” I had said and waited for the admonisher to laugh too.  But it was no joke; I really was being told not to eat healthy fruit at my desk.  They preferred instead that we buy rich muffins or bags of chips from the cafeteria.  No distracting “real food” scent.

I mention this by way of contrast.  Though it took me longer than it should have to realize I’m a poor fit for the Finance industry (Pantyhose and heels?  Fascist food rules?), I did find my way to a better fit.  Higher ed is no paradise but there is an awful lot to love, including the array of personalities that surround me.

When I look around the cubes here, I see a colleague who has built a shrine to her horse.  Another colleague who eats spicy curries for lunch.  A row that has facetiously named themselves “The One %” and given themselves imaginative wealthy fatcat nicknames.  One Halloween we toilet papered each other’s cubes.

I cautiously starting bringing bananas in a few years ago.  I unpeel and eat them in my cube.  And I haven’t looked back.

The kicker is, I don’t think anyone’s been holding out, protecting me. I think they all think someone must have mentioned it already sometime, somewhere. And after all, so hard to segue into these topics, no?

First, he does a fantastic job of showing and not telling with his characters.  For instance, he doesn’t say the main character is clueless about kids.  He has him claim that his very young (made-up) son told him something eloquent like “Dad, I just want you to be happy.”  Like, at an age when kids are hardly forming sentence.  That’s good showing.

Second, I realized that as I read the book, I always assumed that the “Boy” of the title was the tween-aged boy who becomes attached to the main character.  But now I’m realizing – because we watch the main character grow, and come to grips with the fact that he must evolve and finally grow up – I think HE, the grown man, is the “Boy” of the title.

Kind of brilliant, Hornby.

Woohoo!

In other news, my husband I and have been struggling to figure out which character I am from the various shows we watch (our regulars are New Tricks, Inspector Lewis, Psych, 30 Rock, Big Bang Theory, and IT Crowd).  We had already identified him as a combo of Wolowitz from Big Bang Theory and Gus from Psych (“enthusiastic random factoid thrown out at random, anyone?”)

But we were a bit stuck on who I am.  then we both realized, around the same time, that I am Liz Lemon.  For better and worse.  Her twisted, self- deprecating sense of humor, the glasses, the lack of fashion sense, the misadventures, the sometimes tragic lack of filter on what she blurts out, the getting mistaken for being 10-15 years younger, the fear of having to act like an adult.  It’s all there, people.  I embrace my inner lemon and will, er, make lemonade.